Brian Dickson: A Judge's Journey

H. Graham Rawlinson is a corporate lawyer with the international law
firm Torys in Toronto. He is co-author of The Canadian 100: The 100 Most
Influential Canadians of the 20th Century.

Two distinguished authors (one a senior Ontario appellate judge, the
other a leading legal professor) have teamed up to produce this
path-breaking biography of one of Canada’s most important jurists.
Brian Dickson followed an unlikely road to become Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court of Canada. He was a soldier in World War II, and then a
corporate lawyer and businessman in Winnipeg, before surprising everyone
he knew by accepting an appointment to become a trial judge in Manitoba
in 1963. Dickson would go on to become an ideal judge. He had a
prodigious appetite for work, an inherent sympathy for the average
person who came before his court, and a balanced approach to
interpreting and making the law. As a member of the highest court in the
land in 1973, and chief justice from 1984, Dickson was in the right
place at the right time to have a profound impact on the social and
political life in Canada. The advent of the Canadian Charter of Rights
and Freedoms meant that in a few short years, the court reinvented
Canadian law to define and protect the rights of Canadians. Dickson, in
the eyes of many experts, was the most important chief justice in the
court’s history when he retired in 1990.

In the hands of Sharpe and Roach, Dickson’s story is well told. The
authors are the beneficiaries of Dickson’s military-like discipline in
keeping records throughout his storied career, and they had enviable
access to both their subject and his papers. The result is a
never-before-seen view of deliberations at the Supreme Court of Canada.
Dickson’s own doubts about several of his momentous decisions in the
1980s, for example, demonstrate how the court regularly struggled with
the profound choices that the Charter had foisted on it. At the same
time, Dickson’s voluminous papers are something of a burden for the
authors: too frequently, the 500-page biography reads like a detailed
inventory of everything that Dickson ever wrote or did, and, outside of
careful, balanced analyses of many of the Dickson-era court’s
judgments, the book consequently sometimes suffers from a lack of
thematic unity.